Berlin Wall anniversary: a victim tells of his treatment at the hands of the Stasi

Mario Rollig of the Association for the Victims of Stalinism, talks about the
traumatic three months he spent being broken by the Stasi.

The terrifying thing about Mario Rollig's story is the depressing ordinariness of the evil he suffered while imprisoned for three months by the hated Stasi. There was no beating, no torture, no pain; just the expert grinding of a man's spirit until he cracked.

Kept in isolation in a dimly lit cell for three months, he was desperate to talk to his interrogators, to anyone, after just a few days. After a few weeks he began to lose his sight and his hair. But only when his captors threatened to go after his family did he finally open up.

His crime, like so many thousands of East Germans during the 28 years their country was divided, was a simple desire to climb a wall. In love with a West Berliner he met at the airport cafe where he worked, the naive 19-year-old tried to sneak across the border outside the city in 1987, only to be informed on by locals and taken by the Stasi.

He was jailed for a week and interrogated daily before being flown to Hohenschönhausen, the feared Stasi prison in a Berlin suburb, where his real torment began, a time he talked about with Telegraph TV.

"It was like a game of poker", he said, "some days I even felt like I was winning, but they always knew new ways to get to me. I knew I could never win."

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Still he endured, even joking that he would be able to buy a Mercedes with the West German Deutschemark he would collect on leaving. "I'm like a taxi", he would tell the guards, "my meter's always running."

But the threat to jail his sister and take her baby daughter away was too much for Mario. "Not many people will tell you now, but everybody talked, the Stasi would always, always find a way," he said.

And his eventual release shows how cheaply a dissident's life could be bought before the wall came down, he was one of 2,000 prisoners released in a deal Honecker made with the West for a few lumberyards.